Overview
HIJACKING SEARCH ENGINES
The American artist Gretchen Andrew (b. 1988 in Los Angeles, lives and works in Los Angeles) calls herself a “search engine artist.” A computer scientist by training, she harnesses her experience working for Google to manipulate search engines and turn the search terms people enter into art. Her computer-generated visual language comes with feminine connotations that defy the male dominance in the fields of coding as well as politics and business. At first glance, Andrew's pictorial collages look like cluttered and ultimately harmless bricolage, but they are actually powerful graphic vehicles of misinformation capable of altering our digital reality. The artist believes it is important to articulate her concerns through visuals while also realizing them on a virtual meta-level. As a performance artist working on the Internet, she deftly navigates the gray area of “trust boundaries” – a concept in computer science and security that describes a dividing line where program data or execution changes its “level of trust.”
The book is published on occasion of the artist's solo show of the same title at the Francisco Carolinum, Linz, Austria. With essays by Annette Doms, Valeria Facchin, and Inga Kleinknecht.
